I’m looking forward to laying my hands on the recently announced latest desktop products in the Rational Software Delivery Platform. On developerWorks you can find a selection of articles covering the new features in Rational Application Developer and Rational Software Architect.
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Rational V7 desktop products
Saturday, December 9th, 2006WebSphere Business Services Fabric
Saturday, December 9th, 2006Chris has posted on the launch of WebSphere Business Services Fabric v6.0 following IBM’s acquisition of Webify. At the moment this product is only on the very edge of my radar but it’s undoubtedly something I shall be keeping an eye on.
Faster upload
Friday, December 8th, 2006I eventually gave up on the 9 hour upload but, with a little help from Adrian, tracked the problem down to my use of sftp. Having switched to ftp the speed shot up five-hundred fold from 200KB/s to 10MB/s bringing the upload time down to just over 10 minutes! Over the IBM intranet I think I can cope with the lack of security for that much an increase in speed.
Service Registry and Repository Fix Pack 1
Friday, December 8th, 2006The first Fix Pack for WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is now available. The support site only lists a single APAR fix but thanks to Arnauld for pointing out the README file that details the substantial set of improvements that come with this release:
- Added support for WebSphere Application Server ND.
- Install improvements to allow manual database creation.
- Install improvements to allow remote database.
- Ontology API now includes access via Web Services.
- Performance improvements when making large datagraphs governable.
- Performance improvements when importing a large data set.
- Retrieval of data objects can be limited to a depth of 0, 1.
- Additional languages now supported
Shrinking Linux VMware images
Thursday, December 7th, 2006I’ve been putting together a VMware image based on RedHat over the past couple of weeks and the last step was to try and reduce it in size from a massive 18Gb (28Gb if you included the snapshots). Given that 5Gb of this was free space, this should have been relatively easy to achieve. The original disk wasn’t created at a fixed size and, having removed any snapshots and set the disk to be independent-persistent the Shrink panel of VMware tools finally became active. Unfortunately, it only showed the boot partition.
Exploring Web services
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer both come with a piece of functionality known as the Web Services Explorer. Part of the unit test client, this provides a user interface for invoking WSDL defined Web services. Until now, I’ve always used the Explorer by right-clicking on a piece of WSDL and selecting Web Services > Test with Web Services Explorer. This is all very well if the WSDL happens to be in your workspace. What I hadn’t realised until this week is that you can also use the Explorer with any arbitrary URL addressable WSDL.
Customizing the Service Registry and Repository UI
Friday, December 1st, 2006One of the beauties of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository product is it’s flexibility. The development team have begun a new developerWorks series looking at customizing the web based administrative console. The first article covers the basic architecture and concepts but the series promises to go on to cover the ultimate in customization: a new perspective.
Laptop sanity restored
Thursday, November 30th, 2006Over the past month or so my laptop has been driving me slowly insane. It’s performance has been absolutely dire, particularly when trying to work under VMWare. I’ve spent many hours staring at the task manager looking for rogue processes that might explain the constant disk thrashing but to no avail. Process Explorer (one of the Sysinternals tools now owned by Microsoft) came to the rescue indicating that, for example, when running VMWare, 50% of the CPU was being used to handle hardware interrupts.
A quick Google suggested an issue whereby Windows steadily reduces the transfer mode on an IDE channel after six cumulative time-outs or CRC check failures until eventually it hits rock bottom speeds with PIO mode. Checking the device settings confirmed that this had happened or, alternatively, my primary hard disk has always been running in this mode. One suggested mechanism to reset the mode is to uninstall the driver and let Windows reinstall it on reboot. I’m now back in Ultra DMA Mode 5 and everything is zipping along nicely – even the reduction in noise level is noticeable!
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